American Novelists in French Eyes In: Atlantic Monthly, Aug

American Novelists in French Eyes in: Atlantic Monthly, Aug. 46 by Jean-Paul Sartre French novelist, playwright, philosopher, and editor, Jean-Paul Sartre here describes the impact of those American novelists — Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, and Dos Passos — who have had a formative influence upon the young French authors. The essay was translated for us by Miss Evelyn de Solis. 1 There is one American literature for Americans and another for the French. In France the general reader knows Babbitt and Gone With the Wind , but these books have had no influence on French literature. The greatest literary development in France between 1999 and 1939 was the discovery of Faulkner, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Caldwell, Steinbeck. The choice of these authors, many people have told me, was due to Professor Maurice Coindreau of Princeton, who sent us their works in translation with excellent prefaces. But a selection by any one man is effective only if he foresees the demands of the collective group to which he addresses himself. With Coindreau as intermediary, the French public selected the works it needed. It is true that these authors have not had in France a popular success comparable to that of Sinclair Lewis. Their influence was far more restricted, but infinitely more profound. We needed them and not your famous Dreiser. To writers of my generation, the publication of The 42nd Parallel , Light in August , A Farewell to Arms , evoked a revolution similar to the one produced fifteen years earlier in Europe by the Ulysses of James Joyce. Their reception was prepared for by the excellent Bridge of San Luis Rey of Thornton Wilder. It seemed to us suddenly that we had just learned something and that our literature was about to pull itself out of its old ruts. At once, for thousands of young intellectuals, the American novel took its place, together with jazz and the movies, among the best of the importations from the United States. America became for us the country of Faulkner and Dos Passos, just as it had already been the home of Louis Armstrong, King Vidor, the Blues. The large frescoes of Vidor joined with the passion and violence of The Sound and the Fury and Sanctuary to compose for us the face of the United States – a face tragic, cruel, and sublime. Malraux wrote in a famous preface, "The novels of Faulkner are eruptions of Greek tragedy in the detective story." What fascinated us all really – petty bourgeois that we were, sons of peasants securely attached to the earth of our farms, intellectuals entrenched in Paris for life – was the constant flow of men across a whole continent, the exodus of an entire village to the orchards of California, the hopeless wanderings of the hero in Light in August , and of the uprooted people who drifted along at the mercy of the storms in The 42end Parallel , the dark murderous fury which sometimes swept through an entire city, the blind and criminal love in the novels of James Cain. It takes some time for an influence to produce its effect, and it was during the German occupation, when the Germans forbade all printing and reprinting of American books, that we began to see in France the greatest number of works inspired by this new manner of writing. It seemed as if, cut off from their habitual dose of American novels, the French began to write some themselves in order to have something to read. The French novel which caused the greatest furor between 1949 and 1945, The Stranger , by Albert Camus, a young writer who was then director of the clandestine newspaper, Combat , deliberately borrowed the technique of The Sun Also Rises . In Un Homme Marche dans la Ville , the only and posthumous book of Jean Jansion, a very young man who was killed by the Germans in 1944, you might be reading Hemingway – the same short, brutal sentences, the same lack of psychological analysis, the same heroes. Les Mendicants , by Desforêts, and Gerbebaude , by Magnane, used the technique of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying without changing anything. They took from Faulkner the method of reflecting different aspects of the same event, through the monologues of different sensitivities. 1/5 The technique of Simone de Beauvoir, also, was inspired by Faulkner. Without him she never would have conceived the idea, used in Le Sang des Autres , of cutting the chronological order of the story and substituting instead a more subtle order, half logical, half intuitive. And as for me, it was after reading a book by Dos Passos that I thought for the first time of weaving a novel out of various, simultaneous lives, with characters who pass each other by without ever knowing one another and who all contribute to the atmosphere of a moment or of a historical period. These attempts provoked others. Moulouji, the young son of an Arabian workman, found himself suddenly, at thirteen, adopted by French writers and actors who made him read Faulkner and Steinbeck long before he even heard of Racine or Voltaire. His culture is entirely surrealist and American. Not very long ago, when he was nearly twenty, he spoke to me enthusiastically about a book he had just read, which related events "in such a new and such an original manner." It was The Three Musketeers of Alexandre Dumas Père ! Moulouji writes "American" as naturally as one breathes, and with the same innocence. His first book, Enrico , which won the Prix de la Pléiade – is not inferior in its violence, its naive perversity, realism, and poetry, to Tobacco Road or Tragic Ground 1. Today two thirds of the manuscripts which young writers submit to the review which I direct are written à la Caldwell, à la Hemingway, à la Dos Passos. A student named Guicharnand even showed me short stories so profoundly inspired by Saroyan that, not content with using "the American technique" (we speak today in France of "the American technique" in literature as if it referred to dental surgery or a taste for champagne, as we said a while back about a pianist that he had "the American touch"), he locates all his stories in the United States – a United States filled with speak-easies, gangsters, motorcycle cops, all of which derive from novels and films at least twenty years old. These stories bring to mind that other America of fantasy which Kafka described in Amerika . Guicharnand, like Kafka, had never set foot in the United States. He achieved his ideal the day he attempted to retell, in the Saroyan manner, while listening to Duke Ellington's music, an American pre- war film, Only Angels Have Wings 2, which he had seen the day before. You can imagine that, in spite of these new works, we missed American books during the occupation. A black market for American books was established. The headquarters was the Café de Flore, where poor students resold at a profit books which they found in the bookstalls along the Seine. Snobbishness played its part during the period when the underground was unorganized and not yet hazardous and when amateurs thought they could save France by scratching V signs on the walls. The reading of novels by Faulkner and Hemingway became for some a symbol of resistance. Stenographers believed they could demonstrate against the Germans by reading Gone With the Wind 3 in the Métro. In 1944, Marc Barbezat, director of the luxurious review L'Arbalète , which he published himself with a hand press at Lyons, prepared secretly one number consisting of extracts from American books which had not yet been translated. He intended to publish them without submitting them to the censor, right in the midst of the occupation. The work took longer than he anticipated, however. This number of the review appeared shortly after the liberation. It was eagerly read. 2 It is easy to understand my eagerness to see the country of these great writers when I was flying to America in January, 1945. I must confess that in one respect I was disappointed. First, it was impossible to meet any of these men. They were in France, in England, in the Orient – everywhere, indeed, except in the United States. Also, the majority of the cultivated Americans whom I met did not share my enthusiasm for them. An American lady who knew Europe very well asked me one day what American writers I preferred. When I mentioned Faulkner, the other people present started to laugh. The lady, gently amused, said, "Good heavens – that old Faulkner!" Later I met a young liberal writer – the author of some very good historical novels. I told him I had been asked by my publishers to get in touch with literary agents of several writers who were particularly admired in France. He asked me the names of these writers. When I mentioned Caldwell, his friendly senile vanished suddenly; at die name of Steinbeck he raised his eyebrows; and at the mention of Faulkner he cried indignantly, "You French! Can't you ever like anything but filth?" At this same time a New York editor refused to allow the Nouvelle Révue Française to publish a particular novel – very amusing, and hardly malicious at all – about the American publishing world, because, he 1 beide von Erskine Caldwell (A.B.) 2 1939 von Howard Hawks mit Cary Grant und Rita Hayworth (A.B.) 3 von Margaret Mitchell (A.B.) 2/5 said, "the book is anti-American." I discussed Faulkner with students in the universities of the East. These young people, who often knew the works of obscure eighteenth-century writers, had, in some cases, never heard his name.

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